It's fun, but every new model release makes me even less interested to create cool stuff. Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
It's fun, but every new model release makes me even less interested to create cool stuff. Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
„The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.“ -Mitch Hedberg
I don’t like being this person, but you can very easily beat a wall at tennis.
Thank you. That is an amazing quote on a lot of levels.
The same how Magnus Carlsen says he never plays chess against a computer, because it makes no sense to do it.
It makes sense for practice.
Well, people don't play like computers, so this kind of practice can be useless.
those things are fscking relentless
Post-work society is an inevitability if we don't destroy our planet.
I think you're assuming work's only function is getting things done. Work also is a crowd control tool.
Is it realistic to keep people working jobs that don’t get anything done in the long term? I know most people will say that’s already happening, but imagine a society where basically every job is just a bullshit job made to keep you occupied, do you think people will continue working in a society like that?
Like you foresaw, I'll say this is the reality for most people. I think that just like now, those who want to do meaningful work will seek opportunities to do so.
If we had something like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for work, I think meaningfulness would be the top of the pyramid. For most people in the world, not going hungry or affording housing are reasons enough to do work. Getting to do work you find meaningful is truly a privilege.
If work is needed for "crowd control", why aren't popular holiday destinations crime hotspots?
They are crime hotspots
I asked Gemini to list the 10 most popular holiday destinations in the US, and the 10 places with the highest crime. There's only 1 place in the intersection: New Orleans.
Highest violent crime rates:
Memphis, Tennessee: ~2,400–2,500 per 100k
St. Louis, Missouri: ~2,000–2,100 per 100k
Detroit, Michigan: ~1,700–2,000 per 100k
Little Rock, Arkansas: ~1,600–1,800 per 100k
Baltimore, Maryland: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Oakland, California: ~1,400–1,900 per 100k
New Orleans, Louisiana: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Birmingham, Alabama: ~1,600–1,700 per 100k
Milwaukee, Wisconsin: ~1,100–1,600 per 100k
Cleveland, Ohio: ~1,500–1,600 per 100k
Most popular holiday destinations:
New York City, New York
Orlando, Florida
Las Vegas, Nevada
Maui, Hawaii
Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
San Francisco, California
Miami, Florida
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
New Orleans, Louisiana
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, North Carolina/Tennessee
That's a terrible metric, because people going on a vacation probably aren't going there purposefully to commit crimes. What you want to do is look for increases in crime in a given place during holidays
https://coolidgelawfirmaz.com/crime-increase-over-the-holida...
Gary Economics wants to have a word with you.
It would be fun to get to post-work society, but hard to imagine atm. TPTB won't let it happen
But how this transition will even happen?
Soon we will have some machines that can replace 50% of jobs, and this will happen basically overnight...
The steam engine replaced a lot of jobs. Tractors replaced a lot of jobs. Calculators replaced a lot of jobs. Computer used to be a job description before it was a personal device. There will be new jobs.
Entire towns got decimated when their jobs went away, such people fill their lives in drugs and vote for politicians who promise to bring back jobs.
Isn't the point of AGI that it can basically do any job?
It won't happen though
Come on, Gary is compulsive liar with zero credibility and really shitty takes. He’s entertaining though.
Good take, I think his view is a bit simplistic. Also he also have a huge ego
"I am the best economist in UK!"
Gary is not a voice worth listening to. A narcissist, fraud and has terrible epistemics.
> Post-work society is an inevitability if we don't destroy our planet.
Is it?
Walk current technological progress down the road.
I can't see a future in which almost every system (both physical and virtual) are not automated and optimized by autonomous entities.
What do you do when everyone is out of a job?
If you don't want pitchforks and riots in the streets, you give everyone UBI and housing so society doesn't collapse.
> If you don't want pitchforks and riots in the streets, you give everyone UBI and housing so society doesn't collapse.
As much as I’d love UBI to happen, in current geopolitiks it’s a no-go. People are not happy with having what the others have.
I’m all for an UBI but a future where people have no purposeful jobs, no way to actually make a real difference to anything around them, is a bleak one.
I would love such a future. I would be perfectly content focusing on my hobbies and playing video games rest of my life. Perhaps the UBI would be sufficient even for a little bit of travel.
Autonomous police drones will likely be able to handle the pitchforkers and rioters
How do you determine who gets the house on the beach? Who gets the mountain view? Who gets stuck with the corner lot on a busy noisy road?
Even if in the unlikely case UBI gets implemented, there is no way payment will be equal. Why would the rich give up their positions of power? They’ll just get more security and bribe politicians, enough to build private armies and fortresses so the poor and starving can’t touch them, and have no choice but to live out their lives in squalor…we’re seemingly headed that way according to many even without pervasive autonomous machines taking away all work.
It wouldn't be a redistribution of our current assets like that. I think there would be a whole lot of repurposing of these things.
The beach houses, mansions, mountain views could be vacation places, or used as libraries, or simply dismantled for the materials.
The "slums" on noisy roads could be eliminated entirely and used for something people don't need to be at.
We'd move to a more equal distribution of assets closer to the middle line.
and anyone that disagrees you just kill them, right? That's what all good commies do.
Stop hiding behind rainbows and say what you mean.
Or you build bunkers and build robots to keep the riffraff out. Shock collars on the guards' necks.
How do you imagine a post work society where people can have inequality? I don't want to be equal. I want to do more.
> Post-work society is an inevitability
Ah yes because these AI companies are just gonna give away the models for free that I use with my free computer and free smartphone while I eat with my free food in my free apartment.
> Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?
I built a phone app recently, not released to the public, just an idea I had for ages but could never spend the time actually building. Its 100% vibe coded, and took me a few weekends to build... I'm talking a few hours in total.
The point I'm making is that you now have the power to create stuff you would never have had the time to build. You can think big, wild stuff. Experimentation. Throw-away code.
What a time to be alive!
My car has offline maps and navigation. I don't really care for navigation, but I find the maps pretty handy. VW releases updates very infrequently, and I don't know for how long they'll keep doing that. Recently I wondered whether I could convert OpenStreetMaps into the format used by the car. Codex took around a week to do that for me, with some light steering. That project would no doubt have taken me months - maybe a whole year to do on my own, and I'm not fully confident I could pull it off as well as Codex did. I can pull the most up to date maps from OSM, edit them as much as I want, and they look great on the car. It's mind boggling to me that we have this tech.
Does the car not check a signature or anything like that? You can just use any selfmade data?
It does, but someone leaked valid encryption keys on GitHub a few years ago (Codex found them).
Love that, I have similar desires to be able to control some climate controllers so I can get a more native bluetooth connection to it and override their programming for fine control of devices and have it never phone back home. One of these days I'll have time to throw an LLM at it, but I've been working on a dead project for 4 years ago I dropped because I realized how daunting it was going to be turn it into a product, but now I've made progress that would have taken me a year, in a few weekends.
Me too! (although I am hoping to release it, but it was primarily for me)
I was thinking about writing something and hopefully starting a community/resource area around hyper-personalized software, it's so easy to make now. I was thinking about how it'd be useful to have a place to share these, for ideation, sharing techniques and the ability for LLMs to riff on something already existing. It's not quite like open source's advantage of having many people contribute to the same project, but rather something that is closer to evolution, giving the next generation a place to start modifying.
Would you have any interest in sharing what you've made?
Yes, that's cool and useful. Creating stuff for ourselves, for our own use. But we are social animals, we like sharing.
Before it was cool to share an app you made, but now? What's the point of sharing an app, if the other person can make their own, even better suited for their needs, in a few seconds?
indie hacking seems dead-ish because everything can just be cloned instantly, and if you don't have a serious go to market plan with a latent user base you're SOL.
Maybe instead of creating cool stuff try to go and solve real problems? It seems to me that we are lacking in that department since all that LLM fuss has started 3 or so years ago.
What is a "real problem" to you?
It is a subset of something of a value to somebody else and enough so that they are willing to pay you for it, a product, a service. Preferably to pay enough to justify your spent time of course, maybe not right away but at least long term. Even better if not purely digital as it seems we have quite enough of those already.
Just a few:
- Lots of diseases which kill indiscriminately,
- Thousands of people each year feel the need to commit suicide in ways that affect others profoundly, like via train,
- Shoe and clothing sizes are inconsistent and unreliable,
- Male pattern baldness,
- Over dependence on cars for transport, which are noisy, smelly and dangerous,
- Obesity,
- We can buy cigarettes and alcohol freely, but not any decent drugs like MDMA.
OpenAi customer support would be a good start
Like the guy who treated cancer in his dog?
Climate change
I find it regularly incapable of doing the most basic things - maybe the idea is to think in terms of more detail?
It’s kind of like saying what’s the point of poetry when a dictionary exists
Yeah. I’m almost glad I didn’t invest any time in any of my 100s ideas for a startup. Most of them would be destroyed by AI by now.
But, you can create cool stuff just for yourself. That’s the upside. It’s just hard to make a living on cool stuff for yourself.
For some reason, I feel much less excited about creating things myself just knowing that ai can do it in 1/10th of the time. Even if I know it wouldn’t turn into a business or make me money. I don’t know why that is, but I was much more motivated to build anything (even things just for myself) before ai. Kinda depressing
At least for me, I think half the value in building to learn was that the knowledge and skills acquired in the process, especially cursory skills and knowledge, might be useful in the future, even if there was no obvious path to application at the time.
I built several projects at home, many involving learning e.g. graphics programming and rendering, that would never be useful in my professional work, but which were intrinsically interesting and enabled me to build other, more useful projects later on. It also gave me greater confidence in my abilities as an engineer, and cursory skills I learned in the process did help in my professional work.
Now it feels like what’s the point. The machines can or will be able to build anything I could want, useful or not, faster and with less frustration. I probably won’t be able to be employed as an engineer long enough to build a career on said skills. And I can’t mentally justify not spending that time with friends and family, when the expected return is basically zero.
I still find math, science, and engineering interesting and intrinsically rewarding, but in a closer sense to how one might feel about playing video games. The information is or will eventually be useless, so it isn’t worth spending a significant amount of time on.
I've felt the same for a while now. On my free time I have completely stopped building projects where the main motivation is professional learning. I now only build stuff I want or am genuinely interested in, and utilize AI in the process to save time.
Eventually I plan on learning some physical skills, like renovating, working with electronics and plumbing. I doubt robotics will render that useless very quickly.
Wow thank you this was actually very helpful for me in understanding why I’m feeling so demotivated by ai. Gaining knowledge, even if not immediately useful, to become a better overall developer was a huge part of why I enjoyed spending so much time building things in my free time. Now it seems pointless, because with ai, will that knowledge really make a difference? Probably not. Bummer, anyways I appreciate the comment.
The flip side to ai doing your stuff in 1/10 the time is that you can now do 10x more. Even things you couldn’t do at all, in fact.
I find that very motivating. I can do things alone that would have required a team only one year ago.
That's fair, I guess I just enjoy the craft of building stuff rather than the outcome/product itself. Which I know I can still do, but for some reason just doesn't feel the same now. Hard to explain I guess.
Lots of us feel that way. It was motivating to do it, when it couldn’t be 1-shotted by AI in a weekend
The point is to inject something into the process that these AIs can't do for you.
People SHOULD feel like making a useless Mario Kart clone isn't worth the effort anymore. They should, instead, be trying to figure out how to actually use these models to make something that doesn't feel like a useless Mario Kart clone.
One thing that still stands today, is that even vibe-coding a good product takes time and thousands of dollars in tokens costs.
Software will be more like a "proof of work", where people would still pay $100 for good software that took $10k tokens to build.
Is there a point in playing Chess or Go when you know there's a computer out there that can beat you (and everyone else)?
No, that's why I just play against other humans.
In this game of work/development, you can't make sure that other humans don't "cheat". Our work won't compete anymore with other human's work, but with a computer.
Why does it matter if others are "cheating" or not? Your own creation isn't affected by it.
Well, for the same reason playing chess vs a person is more fun than doing chess puzzles, if we follow that analogy.
Also, creating something with AI doesn't really feel like you made it yourself.
And, if you make it without AI, most of the times it feels pointless, why spend 30 days on working on something that can be done faster and better in 1 hour?
I am not saying about doing things for fun, but about creating useful things.
Yes, you can do "hand-crafted" things, and people appreciate that, but for code, people aren't able to see the craft anyway.
Your ability to sell that creation is certainly affected by the competition. Which affects your ability to put food on the table, so to speak.
If the motive is satisfaction/enjoyment then it shouldn't matter what an AI is capable of. You should be happy with your own creation.
If the motive is profit then you should be adopting AI just like you have adopted any other skill or tool of your profession.
You can play PvP in those games. Not really the same with developing software. In fact, not using ai would probably make you lose if there was some “software PvP” mode or development.
You're not being ambitious enough! Spend your tokens now building the primitives and foundations of much larger, complex systems. No matter how much faster and more efficient models get, eliminating the gruntwork will always pay dividends.
The process was for you, the product was for the world.
Now it's just the product for the world, which was where most of the value was anyways.
It's a big paradigm shift and the industry is quickly going to shed people who needed the process to care about the product and we'll be left with people whose motivation to build the product (or money) is enough.
But what product? If the world can also simply ask for the product they want, instead of searching for it?
They won't even have to ask for a specific product, they will just state their problems/needs.
Don't worry, like with every revolutionary technology before this, it takes 5-10 years for people to find new and creative ways to use it. It will be considered its own medium in many spaces (e.g. film is now different to theatre)
But was there ever a technology that even the people working on it said it's making them feel depressed and scared?
I used to work on this stuff. It does not make me depressed nor scared, and my coworkers didn't voice that opinion, either.
You can't cherry pick somebody's opinion and assume it applies to everybody.
I meant the leaders, almost all AI company CEOs voiced concerns for a long time, and even more now.
IMO there has been a regime shift to building things for yourself and what is cool is the output of the tools you make.
I have started building my own Digital Audio Workstation. The point is not to build something to compete with Ableton. The point is to build something and make music with it. If it is a good tool then I should be able to make good music with it and release the music. Actually, the DAW should be the secret sauce of the music and something I wouldn't want to give away.
This feels a lot more like computing in the 90s after taking an odd 25 year detour of an obsession with the tools themselves instead of what the tools can actually do.
Like, professional electronic music artists spend 10s of thousands of hours in a DAW, but at that point it just becomes second nature and the tool disappears so they can focus entirely on the music.
It's less lack of interest in creating that bothers me, it's my lack of interest in learning – it would surely be crazy for a SWE to care about how some new framework works anymore? Even if someone could reasonably argue that it might be slightly useful today there's almost zero chance it will be useful in 6-12 months times.
But it's not just tech – my lack of interest in learning and creating is starting to generalise with the models. Music, writing, coding, maths, etc...
I need to get used to switching my head off and asking the AIs to think for me whenever I need to engage my brain. It still feels very unnatural.
I think a general understanding is still useful, you just don't need all of the details anymore.
The brain loves these kinds of shortcuts.
I don't need to think about the fine motor skills of hitting a baseball, it's just a motion now, and the game is still fun.
But how would you feel if you imagined hitting the ball and a robot arm hit it instead?
Because that's how creating software is starting to feel.
And, any time you mentioned getting a bit better at hitting a ball after practicing over your weekend, a bunch of people carrying printouts of generic exponential graphs jumped out to call you a Luddite who should sell his gear ASAP while it still has any value and or else it's "cope".
lol have you actually tried to build anything useful e2e? Leaving the AI to itself gives horrendous results.
You can contribute to Open Source projects that DO NOT allow AI generated code. For example: zig
This has not been my experience so far.
So this what a deflation economy is like. People don't want to do anything because they feel like whatever they do will be worthless in the near future.
I've retreated to doing stuff with my hands. Wokdwork, DIY, that kind of thing. At least for now and the foreseeable future that doesn't seem pointless. Only problem is it's hard work yet nobody would pay me for it.
Make cool stuff because the process is fun and makes you learn?
Before it was fun because I was learning useful things for the future.
Now it feels like whatever I learn will be obsolete in 2 months.
Then learn how to be creative and use the ai better?
I think the limit increasingly becomes what your imagination and taste can reach
True, but for many domains where my knowledge is limited, the LLMs beat me at imagination and taste too...
Agreed
Can it? Last I checked, all my free software operating systems and browsers were still hacked together trash. I can't wait for AI to actually be good so I can spam a bunch of AGPL code with it.